


All men dream.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 09:55:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They meet a man in Pontiac whose windows and mirrors keep exploding, who falls asleep not knowing whether he’s going to wake up screaming or blowing out the lights. Sam found him on an insomnia message board. His name is Jimmy and he’s the most normal person Dean has ever met, aside from the sleep exploding thing. He sits across from them in a diner booth in a rumpled coat and cries into his hands, talks about the wife and daughter staying with his in-laws, wondering if it will ever be safe for them to come home. He looks at Dean across the table and reaches his hands out, grabs Dean’s wrists, looks him in the face with wild, red-lined eyes.</p>
<p>“I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do,” he says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All men dream.

When Dean opens his eyes he’s lying on the floor on his back, staring up at a white ceiling with a bunch of smirking golden cherubs and fake roses stuck into the plaster along the top of the wall. There’s elevator music coming from somewhere, and the smell of cooking meat. Dean can feel his arms and legs, the rise in his chest as he inhales. He wiggles his fingers. He’s whole. His heart is beating. His eyes can blink.

“What the fuck,” Dean says. He doesn’t move. 

“Mister Winchester,” somebody says, and then a bald guy in an expensive suit leans down over him, into Dean’s field of vision. Dean sits up fast and scoots back and runs into the leg of a table. It hurts, and then stops hurting. The hurting is not new: the stopping is, though. Christ, is this- it can’t be. It _can’t be_. No fucking way. “You’re awake,” the guy says. “That’s good, that’s very good.” Dean’s throat is so dry, his tongue sticks against the roof of his mouth, he can’t form words for a second. And then there’s a glass of water in the guy’s hand. “Drink up, Dean,” he says. He holds it down so that Dean can reach. Dean stares at the glass, stares at the hand, until the guy sighs and clucks his tongue and says, “I suppose I can understand a little hesitation.”

“Where is this?” Dean croaks. “Is this- are we still in hell?”

“And what would that make me?” the bald guy says, grinning, like that’s supposed to be fucking hilarious. “Come on, Dean, does it feel like hell? Look around.” Dean doesn’t. He’s not taking his eyes off this suit-wearing shitbird. “No? Okay. One step at a time, I guess,” the guy says. For a second, his eyes are frozen, weirdly flat and inhuman- and then they’re clear again, and he’s smiling that broad, false smile. “I’m Zachariah,” he says, and extends a hand for Dean to shake. Dean stands up instead, legs trembling a little underneath him; he leans on the table with his palm, just until his head stops swimming. Dean looks down at his treacherous knees and wills them to get their act together. “Got the wobbles?” Zachariah says. “You’ve just had a heck of a road trip.”

“I bet,” Dean says. He looks up. “So maybe you can cut the crap and tell me where the fuck I am.”

“You’re safe,” Zachariah says. His eyes glow. “You’re free.”

 

 

 

 

At first they want him to stay here- here, in this freaky Disney room with the smooth jazz and the plate of burgers that’s always full. He asks them where Sam is and they say it’s not important, he doesn’t need to worry about Sam anymore, and that’s when he starts throwing furniture. In the end they toss their hands up in disgust and just take him to Bobby’s. Instantly. Like a fucking teleporter. Bobby pours holy water in his face and then calls Sam and spends the rest of the night sitting across the kitchen table from Dean, drinking and staring at him with wet eyes whenever he thinks Dean’s not looking. 

“Angels,” Bobby says, awed, about a dozen times. “Who’d have thunk.”

“You trust them?” Dean asks. 

“Dunno,” he says. “Brought you back, didn’t they? Lit up the goddamn yard like Christmas, too. I don’t know if trust’s the right word, but,” he shrugs. “I can see what’s in front of me.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. He rubs at his face and Bobby gets up, pats his shoulder as he passes.

“You go get some sleep,” he says. “Sam’s on his way, he’ll be here before morning. You rest up.” Dean starts to argue and Bobby just scowls at him and points down the hall. “Git,” he says. Dean gits. The spare room bed is lumpy and the sheets are musty but it’s the first bed he’s slept in since- yeah, he doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about anything. Dean puts his face in the pillow and breathes shallow and shuts his eyes and tries not to feel the spike of fear curling at the base of his spine, the back of his neck, warming in the hollow of his throat. He’s safe. They said so. He’s not going back to hell, he’s out. He’s done. His face feels warm, so he flips over. He lies there and drums his fingers on his stomach and stares at the ceiling until it blurs.

Finally, he dreams.

He’s in a public park, tossing a ragged baseball back and forth between his hands, watching Sam at age eight or nine climbing the monkey bars. The sun’s high, searingly warm. Sam swings from the top bar. Dean watches him go back and forth in silhouette, swinging, swinging, forward and backward. The sun gets hotter, more intense. Dean squints up into the sky and feels a terrible vertigo take hold, a dizzying rush that sweeps him over; he falls onto his back and lies there staring up at the light, the overpowering radiation, blisteringly bright. But it’s not only light, it’s- pressure. It hammers at his chest and pulls his bones, sinks him down into the dirt. He tries to speak and can’t hear a thing, can’t hear a single damn thing over the rushing noise in his ears. He tries to see Sam but he can’t, the playground’s just a blur. 

“Sam,” he says, screaming now, though it sounds like a whisper, too far away. “ _Sam_!” And everything bursts into flames. He wakes up shrieking with Sam and Bobby over him, both of them holding onto his thrashing arms and looking terrified. He pushes them away and goes to the bathroom and locks himself inside for fifteen minutes. Dean runs the water in the sink and drinks it in huge handfuls and stares at himself in the mirror, wondering what the fuck is happening to him, what he is now. When he comes out he starts to apologize and then looks around at the room in a daze while Bobby and Sam shuffle awkwardly from foot to foot amongst the broken glass. “Um,” Dean says. “Both windows?”

“Right when you started hollering,” Bobby says. “That’s what got us up the stairs.”

“Shit,” Dean says. “I don’t know- Bobby, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bobby says. “Just scared us, that’s all. You sure you’re okay?” 

“Fine,” Dean says. “I’ll clean it up.”

Bobby makes Sam sweep it up instead; Dean sits on the edge of the bed and feels like a fucking idiot while his brother clears the floor. Afterwards they get some plastic sheeting out of the shed and duct-tape it over the empty windows. Sam tries to get him to go back to sleep but he can’t anymore. He feels jittery and hollow inside, lost, like there’s something he ought to have remembered. Sam sits down next to him at the end of the bed and pats him on the back.

“Dean,” Sam says, soft, “when you feel like you want to talk about it-“

“That would be never,” Dean says.

 

 

 

 

It happens again, six or seven times: one minute Dean’s dreaming about staring into a flashlight, or right into the sun, or into the headlights of a car, any bright light, and then the next he’s waking up covered in bits of mirror, broken whiskey bottles. They run out on paying for a motel room outside Reno when Dean’s dreams bust every light bulb in the entire building, and the glass fronts of the vending machines for good measure.

“We have to figure this out,” Sam says, when he catches Dean with a pocket full of No-Doz and a bottle of Pepsi. “You can’t stay awake all the time. You’re a mess.”

“I’m fine,” he says, and three days later he almost drives them straight off a bridge going over the Little Cedar River. Sam makes him go to bed- even makes him take a couple of sleeping pills- and Dean dreams about candle flames in the dark, flickering lights that float up into the sky and vanish like distant stars. But then the light comes back, stronger and sharper than ever, and Dean wakes up to the sound of Sam cursing and picking window shards out of his hair. Dean starts sleeping just an hour or two at a time, taking naps in the car or setting the alarm on his watch or Sam’s cell phone whenever he crawls into a motel bed. It’s long enough for him not to feel like a complete zombie, but not long enough that the deep dreams start. Sam’s not happy about it, says they’ve got to find a better way. “Yeah,” Dean says. “Sure.” They try spells and hex bags, charms for sleep, healing rituals. Nothing helps. Sam starts searching for unusual sleep phenomena and he gets a couple leads, tells Dean they’re heading to Illinois. They’ve been on the road two days when Zachariah shows up. He appears in front of the television while Dean’s trying to watch the last five minutes of Star Trek III. Sam’s out getting dinner.

“We have an important job for you,” Zachariah says. “Do you know what a seal is, Dean?”

“The animal, or the stripe at the top of a Ziploc bag?”

“Very funny,” Zachariah says. “Always so funny, you humans. But it’s too bad you don’t have to know what a seal is to break one.” 

After Zachariah’s finished talking and gone again Dean sits and folds and re-folds the motel brochure in his hands and tries to make his brain go blank. But he can’t. When Sam comes back with take-out Dean is still sitting in the same spot.

“You hungry?” Sam asks.

“You know it,” says Dean.

He wasn’t saved, after all. He wasn’t lifted up, he didn’t rise. He is just a piece of meat scraped out of the bottom of the garbage. 

 

 

 

 

They meet a man in Pontiac whose windows and mirrors keep exploding, who falls asleep not knowing whether he’s going to wake up screaming or blowing out the lights. Sam found him on an insomnia message board. His name is Jimmy and he’s the most normal person Dean has ever met, aside from the sleep exploding thing. He sits across from them in a diner booth in a rumpled coat and cries into his hands, talks about the wife and daughter staying with his in-laws, wondering if it will ever be safe for them to come home. He looks at Dean across the table and reaches his hands out, grabs Dean’s wrists, looks him in the face with wild, red-lined eyes.

“I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do,” he says. His eyes shut and fat tears well out onto his cheek, down his jaw, trembling on his chin. “Someone needs me, need my help, but when I wake up, I can’t remember.” Dean shakes him off and says he’s sorry, but they don’t know what they’re dealing with. They do an exorcism on the guy, put some wards around his house. Sam tries out an enochian ritual they got out of one of Bobby’s old books, some kind of blessing. None of it did anything for Dean, but they try anyway. They stay the night and Jimmy falls asleep on the couch in front of them, too exhausted to be embarrassed about it. He sleeps peacefully for six hours and wakes up okay and treats Dean and Sam like heroes after that. He shakes their hands half a dozen times and tries to pay them and then says he’ll pray for them, he’ll pray for them every night, he’ll never forget them.

“You think we helped?” Sam asks, as they drive away. “You think it’ll come back?”

“I have no fucking clue,” Dean says. 

 

 

 

 

They are just outside of Kansas City and Dean is dreaming again. For the first time in a week there are no blistering, brutally strong lights, no skin-searing glare. There’s not even smoke and brimstone, no smell of flesh thick in his throat, making him choke. There’s just a flickering glow in his eyes that makes his head ache. His skin itches a little. He’s wearing a polyester shirt with a nametag clipped to the front that says _David_. Dean looks down at himself, at his arms, skinnier, covered in freckles. He is dreaming about the Circle K outside of North Platte. He’s fifteen years old again and he’s got himself an after-school job slinging hot dogs and mopping the floors because dad’s money was starting to run out and he’s not supposed to be back for another two weeks. He could have gone to work at the Mister Moo’s, pulling soft-serve cones and hitting on girls through the plexiglass service window, but everyone at his shitty temporary high school takes their dates there and he’s tired of looking at their happy faces. He’s also tired of hearing Sam ask in his little-kid voice if that was the last box of cereal. So he’s here, cleaning up piss in the gas station toilets and stacking the displays of motor oil for like five fifty an hour. In his dreams Dean broods and scrubs the floor with more force than is required. In his dreams he smells the grease of the hot dog rollers and thinks about whether or not he’s even going to bother finishing his homework. 

Dean mops and dreams; the ragged end of the mop head swirls the dirty water in little currents around his feet. Everything’s sinking into the floor, wet and dark and hazy. Dean stares up into the drink coolers, at the electric colors of soda- orange, yellow, green- and his eyes go in and out of focus. There’s a man at the end of the aisle. Sitting on the floor. Staring up at the lights, too. It’s the same guy from Pontiac, the guy with the bad dreams: dark hair and slumped shoulders. But his coat isn’t just rumpled, it’s filthy, practically in rags. It looks like it’s been shredded to pieces but it still hangs around him, more like a cloak. A shroud. Dean trudges over to him through a river of muddy water, through the slime moving slowly up to his knees.

“Hey buddy,” he says. The man’s face turns towards him, slowly. His eyes are wide and stunned. He stares at Dean. Dean tries to remember his name. Jim or Jimmy, something plain and boring. “Man, you can’t stay here,” Dean says. “My manager will be super pissed.” The man looks at Dean and then up at the ceiling, at the long glowing rips of fluorescent light. He turns his eyes back on Dean and they’re so bright, too, that they hurt, like the sun in the park, like the headlights, like the burning stars. So, okay, maybe not Jimmy after all.

“Please,” he says. His voice is raw. “Dean, don’t make me go.”

“You got to,” Dean says. The water is climbing him like a ladder, filling his ears and nose, soaking his shirt, pulling him down. Dean’s so cold. “Buddy, you got to go.”

“Please-“ he says, but Dean is already slipping under, Dean is thrashing in the muck, drowning, Dean is totally in darkness, and then there’s a lamp, a bed, a floor that he’s rolling down onto, landing square on his stupid sleepy ass. Dean falls right off the side of the bed and pulls half the blankets with him. He thumps his head against the nightstand. Somebody clicks the lamp on. It’s Sam. Sam, bleary-eyed and wearing a sweatshirt. His hair’s sticking straight up, like the bride of Frankenstein. 

“Dean?” he asks. And then: “Dean. Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Dean says. He waves dismissively between the beds. “I’m good, go back to sleep.”

“Hey,” Sam says. He blinks at the clock. “You’ve been out four hours. You didn’t break the bulbs.”

“Whoop dee doo,” Dean says.

“Dean.”

“Go to sleep.”

“You sure? Do you-”

“ _Sleep_ ,” Dean says, and Sam shrugs sadly and slowly clicks the light back off. He rolls over and after a few minutes of tense silence he shifts and he’s snoring again. Dean wonders if he’ll even remember it in the morning. Dean sits on the floor for a while until his legs get cold, and then he climbs back up into bed. He doesn’t think he’ll fall asleep again. But he does. And from then on, nothing breaks. No windows, no bulbs. He stops dreaming about bright lights.

Instead, he dreams about hell.

 

 

 

 

“Who pissed in his coffee?” Dean asks Anna, when Uriel is gone again. Anna gives Dean one of those eye-rollingly irritated expressions but then she sighs and picks at the hem of her coat. It’s such a human gesture that Dean finds himself watching it, caught, fascinated. A hiccup in the façade of these heavenly types is always worth wondering about. Anna’s like that, more than the others. She smiles more, gets angry more, doesn’t speak to Dean like he’s a walking talking garbage bag. She’s a puzzle. Dean almost likes her.

“He’s got a lot on his mind,” Anna says, finally. “We all do.”

“More like we got a lot on our plate,” Dean says. He sits down and folds his arms across his chest. “How are we supposed to find this witch, anyway, if you guys can’t?” Anna shrugs  
.  
“You’ll think of something.” But she doesn’t offer a suggestion. Instead she stands there and fiddles with her jacket some more.

“What’s happening?” Dean asks. “Something’s bothering you guys. All of you.” Anna’s eyes flip up, from the floor to Dean’s face. And they move away again just as quickly. 

“Nothing,” she says. It’s too fast, too sure. “Just find the witch.”

Then she’s gone, too.

 

 

 

 

Dean falls asleep in the passenger seat, and when he opens his eyes the car is still moving along the road but there’s nobody driving. For some reason that doesn’t freak him out. Dean just lies there with his head against the glass and the stars rushing by, millions of points of light winking in the darkness, beautiful inky black darkness that goes on all around the car and swallows up the road.

“I can’t see them anymore,” somebody says, from the back seat. Dean swivels around and it’s him again, the ragged guy. He’s staring out the window too, slumped down against the door. He looks forward at Dean. “The stars,” he says.

“Oh,” says Dean. And then: “Sorry.” The guy shakes his head.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “I failed you.”

“I don’t even know you,” Dean says. “I mean, I recognize the dude you’re wearing.”

“Oh,” the guy says. “Yes. It was difficult to communicate with you, without this,” he says, and glances down at himself. “Simulacrum.”

“If you say so.”

The car sails along until the road ends and then it goes careening out into the dark, falling faster and faster. Dean feels his body floating and then the drop in the pit of his stomach, the jolt in his limbs. He wakes up suddenly, queasily, and finds Sam in the driver’s seat murmuring along to a Sister Hazel song on the soft rock station. “What the fuck,” Dean demands, and flips the dial. Sam scowls at him, but doesn’t change it back.

 

 

 

 

“Who exactly got me out of hell?” Dean asks Anna, when they’re finally alone. Sam is off with Ruby, Dean knows, and is trying not to fucking thinking about it. So it’s just him and Anna and a Rangers game on the television, which she pointedly hadn’t been paying any attention to. But now she shifts in her seat and stares out the window and ignores him harder and generally acts like the shiftiest person in the world. It’s incredibly frustrating. If she wasn’t literally the only angel who didn’t treat him like boot scrapings, Dean would be slamming his hand on the tabletop and yelling by now.

“We did,” she says.

“You?” Dean asks. “You personally?” She looks away. “Zachariah? Uriel? That asshole with the beard whose name I don’t know? The blonde lady?”

“No,” she says.

“Give me a name,” Dean says. “I deserve that,” he says. Anna looks up, meets his eyes. “I think I deserve that, at least.”

“Many angels went down to find you,” she says. Her voice has gone soft, like she’s telling Dean a secret, even though he’s heard this speech already, in so many variations, all with the same lousy lie of a punchline. He can practically recite it. “The righteous man. Many angels died. But your soul was found and brought up to the light. He-“ she says, and falters. “He made sure of that.”

“Who did, Anna?”

“Castiel,” she says, in a whisper.

“So what,” Dean says. “He brings me up, and takes off? Too good to shake hands with the righteous seal-breaker?” 

“That’s not-“ Anna stops, and shakes her head. There’s a thin, sad smile at the corners of her mouth. “If you knew Castiel, you wouldn’t say those things.”

“I’ve met everybody else in Bible Club,” he says. “So I guess he’s busy.”

“Busy,” she repeats, incredulously. She looks back out the window. “You could say that.”

 

 

 

 

They have a salt and burn in Wyoming and for a couple of days it’s like old times, before hell and angels, before Sam and Ruby, before everything was spiraling out of control at all times, spinning Dean like a windmill. He even gets Sam to throw back a couple of beers at a shitty country-western bar. They eat deep-fried crap and play darts and Dean pretends that he is twenty-six still and he doesn’t have to worry about anything beyond gas prices going up again. That night in his motel bed he dreams about Sonny’s house, about the farm. He dreams he is an adult and not a lost kid anymore, wandering the grounds, finding nobody. And then he is digging out a vegetable bed in the backyard, his arms knotting up when he lifts the shovel for the hundredth time. The sun’s hot on his back and the ragged man with the blue eyes is sitting back on his heels, watching Dean dig the rows.

“You could help,” Dean grumbles. The ragged man smiles at him. “I don’t know why you come here,” Dean says. “There’s nothing to see.”

“Dean Winchester,” the man says. “You may not know this. But you are the only thing here worth looking at.” Dean stares at him and wipes the sweat from his forehead. He hopes, absurdly, there’s lemonade in the house.

“You’re so fucking weird,” he says. 

“I-“ the man looks confused. “Thank you?” he says. There’s a rumble in the distance, the feeling of static in the air like storm clouds gathering. The ragged man stands up and the wind catches the edge of his coat, lifting it up, twisting it flat against his body. His clothes are too big for his frame. Dean turns his face into the wind and smells sulphur, ash. “I don’t want to go,” he says.

“So don’t,” Dean says. “Stay.” The ragged guy looks at him, surprised and wounded, and Dean wonders for a second if his eyes aren’t filling with tears. 

“I can’t,” he says.

“You’re afraid of something,” Dean says. 

“I’m afraid,” he says, “that you’ll let go.”

“Well, I won’t.” Dean sticks a hand out between them. “Okay? Shake on it.” The guy is still for a second, like he can’t believe it, and then he takes Dean’s hand between both of his own, and leans forward to press the back of Dean’s knuckles to his cheek, briefly, like a blessing, or a kiss. “Um,” says Dean.

“ _Ils aao tol nor-molap_ ,” the man says. "Righteous one."

“I don’t speak-“ Dean starts, and the wind picks up and howls around them. “I won’t let go!” he calls, into the roar of the bending trees, the scream of the barn doors as they flap faster and faster. “I won’t!”

When Dean wakes up he’s freezing; the air conditioner is rattling like a can of change. He lies in the dark and stares at the ceiling and wonders what the fuck it is he’s missed.

 

 

 

 

“You guys can go into dreams, right?” Dean asks, and Anna turns around, almost drops the magazine she’s holding. It’s one of Sam’s. “I know you can.”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s- possible.”

“Well, let’s say, hypothetically, somebody was in my dreams.” Anna does drop the magazine then, onto the closest motel bed. She stares at Dean intently. “And hypothetically, they were, uh, trapped.” He thinks about the ache in the ragged man’s eyes. “Lost,” Dean says. “Let’s say they were lost.”

“Dreams can be a conduit,” Anna says. “Dreams can be a door to other places.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “And if I wanted to open that door-“

“You would have to be very careful,” Anna says, “about what was on the other side.”

 

 

 

 

“Don’t worry,” Dean says. He looks across the room at the candles and bowls of sage and nightshade, Pamela sitting cross-legged on the floor in her Ramones shirt, Sam sitting on the edge of the other bed and staring at Dean like he’s a fucking lunatic. “It’s probably gonna work.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Sam huffs. Pamela laughs without opening her eyes. She keeps saying she’s concentrating, trying to find the channels, but Dean is starting to wonder whether or not she’s just hungover.

“If it doesn’t, sweet thing,” she says, “you can always try, try again.”

She makes Dean lie down on the bed and she brushes something cool and sweet-smelling across his cheeks, a stripe across his forehead. She chants in Latin at first and then switches to something else, something Dean doesn’t follow. He feels his limbs loosen and sink into the mattress, in the direction of the ground. And behind his eyelids he sees colors, purple and red, flecks of light, starbursts that fade like fireworks. And then he’s standing in a parking lot outside a 7-11, and the ragged man is sitting on the pavement with his hands folded around his knees. 

“Okay,” Dean says, and the man’s head jerks up at the sound of his voice. “No more cryptic stuff. I’m pretty lucid this time.”

“How?” the man says, and narrows his eyes. “You’ve entered a trance state. You’re using a psychic.”

“Ding ding ding.” Dean folds his arms across his chest. “So what are you doing in my head?”

“It’s not safe.”

“It’s a dream,” Dean scoffs. “Pretty much the definition of safe.”

“No,” the guy says, and stands. “It isn’t.”

“Look, you know my name,” Dean says, sidling closer. “It’s not fair I don’t know yours. You can trust me. You said you didn’t want to go. That you didn’t want me to let go. You need me for something. You need my help.”

“I won’t endanger you,” the guy says, and okay, Dean doesn’t have a fucking clue what to think about that. “I’ve spent too much time here as it is. I should have- I should never have come back. I only-“

“You only what?”

“I only wanted,” the guy says, and stops himself, shakes his head sadly. “I am not meant to want.”

“Yeah, right,” Dean says. “Because you’re an angel.” The other guy looks surprised. “I guessed. Anna told me-“ Dean says, and the guy’s face goes sad and bare for a second, and Dean puts two and two together finally. “Holy shit,” Dean says. “You’re Castiel.” The ground rumbles and the parking lot lights blow out. Castiel takes Dean’s arm with one hand, instinctively, protectively, and Dean feels an electric current vibrate up his muscles and shudder down his spine. “Whoa,” he says. His whole body feels like it’s trembling a little.

“You have to go,” Castiel says. “I’ll lead them away.”

“Away from what?” Dean demands. “What the fuck is going on? Why are you squatting in my dreams like a heavenly hobo?” 

“It’s-“ Castiel falters, “I have to keep running,” he says. “I have to keep hiding, or they’ll- Dean,” he says, and throws an arm over Dean’s head, cradles his skull as they fall, as the windows of the 7-11 explode out into a trillion tiny pieces, showering them in glass. Dean feels the warmth of his hand on the back of his neck. “I’m sorry,” Castiel says. “I don’t mean to bring them to you.” He pulls Dean to his feet and they stare at each other, with Castiel’s hands grasping the fabric of Dean’s sleeves. “This is just the only place that isn’t burning.”

“Castiel-“ Dean says.

“Go!” Castiel shouts, and then there’s something shuddering in the dark, out past the road, where the streetlights have gone out, and Castiel is between Dean and the dark, and he is made of light and sound, he is spreading rays of brightness across the parking lot, across the bottom of the sky-

-and Pamela shrieks and Dean sits up and the motel carpet bursts into flames.

 

 

 

 

He promises Sam he’s not going to try again, but the next time Sam is gone on research and the angels are all quiet on the western front for fifteen fucking seconds, finally, Dean pulls a bowl of sage and nightshade out from under the bed and starts the ritual on his own. He manages to get himself under and then for a long time there’s nothing, there’s a dark empty room with no doors, there’s just weight and pressure and heat.

“Mister Winchester,” somebody says, “what a delight.” and Dean turns on his heel, slowly, trying not to crawl straight out of his own fucking skin.

It’s Alastair. 

“Not real,” Dean says. Alastair smiles.

“Don’t you wish that were true,” he says. Dean doesn’t respond to that. “Well. Maybe this will change your mind.” He waves a hand and then they’re not alone, there’s a circle with a man kneeling in the middle of it, a ragged man in a ruined coat, with two great dark shadows extending over him like trails of smoke. It takes Dean a second to recognize Castiel. It takes him a second longer to realize that the trails of smoke rising in great plumes from his back aren’t smoke at all, but wings. Burnt wings. They vibrate in and out of existence in Dean’s eyes, like even the dream can’t fully contain them. They are enormous, dwarfing out the room, filling the top of the ceiling. “Amazing,” Alastair says, circling Castiel. “No angel has ever lasted so long, running in hell.”

Dean doesn’t bother saying, _let him go_. Doesn’t bother asking for mercy. That would be sad and pointless. Instead he tries to focus on Castiel, tries to focus on getting him to raise his head, to acknowledge Dean. Pamela taught him to project himself, to imagine his dreaming will as a kind of power. So he reaches out to Castiel, and Castiel lifts his head.

“Dean,” he says. His face is streaked with ash and cinders. “Run.”

“Not without you,” Dean says. 

“Touching,” Alastair sighs. Dean ignores him.

“Castiel,” he says. “If I open a door, can you come though it?”

“I don’t know-“

“Would you like to know,” Alastair says, from behind Dean now, vanishing and reforming like mist at Dean’s back, “what he looks like inside?” There’s a razor on the ground. Dean doesn’t know if it was there before. It glints at him, and Dean can see it in his own hands, and suddenly it’s there, it’s cold in his palm and he’s soaked in blood, crusted over with bile and flesh and-

“Dean,” Castiel says. Dean looks at his hands again. They’re clean. “Save yourself.”

“He can’t,” Alastair hisses. “He can’t be saved.” But Dean isn’t listening, Dean doesn’t want to hear anything but the sound of air rushing from an open door- he concentrates on a little space in that darkness, just a sliver, a crack, and he wedges it open with everything he has. “He can never be saved!” Alastair screams, and he lunges for Dean. But this is Dean’s dream, Dean’s head, and he wills him to fall, so he does. Alastair stumbles and falls on the floor, crawling for Dean’s ankles, clawing at the ground as he sinks into it, into a river of blood that rises and rises. There’s so much screaming and heat and the stench of vomit but Dean can still feel it, the wind curling in soft tendrils from the open door. 

“Castiel,” he says, and the angel rises, unsteady, to his feet. Dean stretches out a hand. “You coming, or what?”

Castiel comes forward, ravaged wings outstretched like evening clouds, a softer darkness than the blindness of hell, streaked with sky and glowing like the moon. Dean wraps their fingers together and tugs, and the whole world collapses.

Dean wakes up to Sam shaking him and saying words Dean wasn’t aware he even knew.

“Sonofafuck, Dean,” Sam says, raggedly. “What the living hell?” Dean sits up and blinks; he rolled off the mattress onto the floor, and apparently started a little fire when he kicked the sage bowl over. There’s a scorch mark on the carpet next to him. But then Dean turns his head and has to rub his eyes to be sure of what he’s seeing. “Did you do this?” Sam is asking him. “Did you do all this yourself?” One whole side of the motel room is burnt to a crisp; the curtains hang off the rods in shreds, and the table and chairs are basically rubble. The plastic phone’s melted to the desk. The room stinks like hellfire, sulfuric smoke. The carpet is charred black.

“Um,” says Dean. “Maybe.”

Two days later there is a knock at another motel room door; Dean and Sam look at each other from their opposite beds and then get up quickly, quietly. Sam has Ruby’s knife in his hand and Dean gets the Beretta from under his other pillow. Dean slides over to the window and glances out between the curtains and the frame, then goes to the door and swings it open. Behind him, Sam makes a kind of irritated noise, but Dean’s past caring. He stands in front of the open door and there he is, the ragged guy, looking clean and pressed and oddly stiff-backed, hands in his pockets, like a kid that wants to make a good impression. Dean looks him up and down but mostly he looks at the eyes- they’re not the same as Jimmy’s eyes, the sad guy who couldn’t sleep. They’re blue and startlingly bright. They regard Dean gravely from the doorway. After a long second they crinkle up, when he smiles.

“Hey,” Dean says.

“Hello,” says Castiel.

 

 

 

 

Anna taught them the enochian wards when nobody was looking, but Castiel teaches them even more. There is something off about him, something strange and untethered that even the other angels sense and disapprove of, vividly: Uriel basically tries to murder him. Anna puts a blade through Uriel’s chest cavity and then for a while they’re left alone on the road. Castiel spends that time carving sigils into their ribs and showing them how to hide themselves from heaven and then one day when things are going to shit and they’ve been caught and Zachariah is thundering about divine will and about how Dean should be grateful to be more than just another decaying meatsack for once, Castiel shows them how to banish other angels. He stands there bloody and panting with his hand braced against the wall, and then it is just Dean and Sam and Castiel alone in a motel room in Des Moines.

“Did we just-“ Sam says, and looks around the room, taking it all in. “Did we just tell heaven to go fuck itself?”

“Uh,” says Castiel.

“Looks like,” says Dean. He claps Castiel on the back, and then grabs his arms when he staggers a little. “Cas?”

“I’m fine,” he says. He isn’t. He’s falling, it turns out. He’s cold sometimes and sometimes hot now, he hurts, he wants to finish Dean’s sandwiches. He’s using the angel blade more than his hands to kill demons, because the mojo runs out faster and faster. He gets headaches. He wants to sleep but he can’t, until Dean talks to him quietly from the opposite side of the bed, tells him stupid plots from television shows, talks nonsense until Castiel’s breath evens out and his clenched hands uncurl. Dean stares at him in the dark and feels a sensation like vertigo, like the first dream, when he was light and holy fire and deafening silence. In the morning Castiel is awake before both of them, sitting on the edge of the bed staring into his hands. “I have to go,” he says, and then he’s gone before Dean can say, _no_.

He comes back with Anna, three days later. They appear in the middle of the road and Dean almost plows straight into them; instead he veers off onto the shoulder and the car jerks over gravel and grass and comes to a stop about a foot from the guard rail.

“What the fuck!” Dean yells, out the open window, and gets out of the car. His hands tighten on the frame when he sees that Anna is the only thing holding Castiel up; he’s bloody and wrecked and slumped against her. Dean runs forward and Sam follows him and together they get them both into the car. Sam drives and Anna sits up front and Castiel sits in the back with Dean, healed now, but still shell-shocked and glassy-eyed until Dean leans across the bench seat and cups Castiel’s face between his hands. He’s surprisingly warm. “You’re okay,” Dean says. “You’re here, you’re okay.”

“He’s not okay,” Anna says. She turns in her seat. She looks like she’s been crying. “He’s been cast out.” Dean stares at her and then back at Castiel. Castiel looks up at him, eyes red-rimmed, purple shadows beneath them.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Dean says.

“I do,” Castiel says. He squeezes his eyes shut. “They wanted it. They wanted you to break the seal, they want Sam to keep drinking demon blood and kill Lilith, they want it, they want everything to happen, they don’t want us to stop it. They want the end of the world.”

“Oh my God,” Sam says, in the front seat. 

“ _Drinking demon blood_?” Dean shrieks.

A lot of things happen at once.

 

 

 

 

Dean is dreaming that he is sitting on a dock watching the sun go down, dangling his legs off the edge and letting his bare feet dip into the water. The air is warm and the water’s cool and he can smell grass and fresh water and rotting wood, sickly-sweet. When he turns to look over his shoulder, Castiel is there in his rumpled suit, staring down at him. “You can still do this, huh?” Dean asks. “Dream-walk?”

“For now,” Castiel says. He looks up, then, into the fading sky. “Not much longer.”

“Oh,” Dean says. “Well, come sit down,” he says, and pats the space next to him. Castiel sits, cross-legged, until Dean convinces him to take his shoes and socks off, too, and put his feet into the water. He watches Castiel’s face as his toes connect. “Feels good?” Castiel stares down at his own feet, and swings them back and forth. “It’s not all bad.”

“What?”

“Being, uh,” Dean says. “Being more like us.”

“Falling, you mean.” Castiel tucks his chin against his chest and looks thoughtful. “I don’t know what it will be like, when it’s over.” He turns his face back to Dean. “But thank you. Thank you for that, and- for everything.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I will mention it,” Castiel huffs, “until you understand this.” He looks at Dean across the short space between then. The edge of his hand brushes Dean’s, lighter than the touch of air, and then moves away. “You saved me.”

“Just returning a favor,” Dean says.

When Dean wakes up he’s on his back in a motel bed and Castiel is still sleeping next to him, curled into himself, hands against his chest. Dean rolls onto his side and watches him. Wonders if he’ll start having his own dreams, and staying out of Dean’s. That thought makes a place in Dean’s chest ache. In the next bed, Sam snores and turns over. There’s a small noise from elsewhere in the room and Dean lifts his head, sees Anna sitting in a chair by the window. She stares at him for a long minute, and then looks away. He gets up quietly and slides into his boots, shrugs his jacket on, picks up a motel key. He nods at her and they go out together, to stand in the parking lot in front of the car. Dean exhales into the air and watches his breath go up in wisps, like cigarette smoke. “So this is it, huh,” he asks her. “Me and my brother, you and yours. This is the whole team.”

“There are others who doubt,” Anna says. “But, yes. As far as I know, we’re alone. No one else will stand with us, not after-“ she stops herself, and rubs her arms with her hands, like she’s cold. Dean slides his jacket off and hands it over, and she glares at him like he’s an alien.

“Come on,” he says. Anna takes the coat and puts it on and buries her hands in the pockets, looking guilty. “You okay?”

“I’ll fall, too,” she says. “Eventually.”

“Sorry,” Dean says. She shrugs.

“I made a choice,” she says. “Like Castiel. I am not afraid.” She looks at Dean. Her eyes soften. “Did you know,” she says, “we all felt it, the moment he reached you in hell?”

“No,” he says. 

“We could hear it,” she says. She turns her face away from him, to smile up at something Dean can’t see. “He was singing.” 

Anna stays out in the parking lot, watching the stars go by overhead with infinite slowness. Dean goes back into the room and takes his boots off and slides back under the covers, shivering a little but trying not to shake Castiel too much. But Castiel wakes up anyway, fuzzy-eyed and soft and reaching out in confusion. 

“Dean,” Castiel murmurs. “You’re cold.” Dean pulls the covers back over his shoulders, curls closer, lets Castiel put a hand around Dean’s forearm, tuck his fingers into the joint of Dean’s elbow. Castiel’s eyes droop closed; he sighs and Dean pushes the hair back from his forehead, rests his other hand over Castiel’s wrist. He rubs his thumb over the skin there. It’s warm in the bed, warmer between them, like a cocoon. “Better?” Castiel asks, yawning.

“Better,” Dean says.

He doesn’t let go.

 

 

.

**Author's Note:**

> The enochian, _ils aao tol nor-molap_ , translates roughly to: _thou, amongst all sons of men_.


End file.
